Collecting Car Stuff Is in All of Us

TIMOTHY A. CLARY -- Getty Images

There are people in seersucker suits sipping mimosas in Pebble Beach as I write this. They're standing next to Hispano-Suizas and Horches and Ferraris with eight-figure valuations. It's Monterey Car Week, and one car nut is saying to another, "Hey, is that Jay Leno?"

Meanwhile, a few miles down the road from the Car and Driver cubicle farm and writing dungeon, middle-aged guys in T-shirts are cruising up and down Woodward Avenue in old Pontiacs, vintage Oldsmobiles, antique Mercurys, and prehistoric La Salles. Some of the cars are worth millions; most of them are precious solely for the sentiment and history behind them. One of the people there is looking across to a friend and saying in a thick Michigan accent, "That's one badass gray ponytail you're sporting there, dude."

Me? I'm in my office here in Santa Barbara looking across the room at the plastic tubs where I store my Hot Wheels collection. I've got about 6000 cars accumulated since the moment I bought my first in 1968 when I was six years old. The most valuable one might be worth $40. And I'm thinking to myself, "Why do I keep buying these things?"

Here's the inevitable TED talk about why we collect things.

At our core, everyone who loves cars collects something about them. It may be bumper stickers or Porsche 917s, oil cans or zero-mile muscle cars, old posters or Ayrton Senna's old F1 cars. Or it may just be the trivia and memories we keep in our heads until the moment comes when someone will listen to us about the subject. Part of the great allure about cars is that there's always something else to learn about them. And there's something truly delicious about defeating a friend in an impromptu trivia contest.

"Observing collectors, one soon discovers an unrelenting need, even hunger, for acquisitions," wrote Werner Muensterberger in his 1994 book Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives. "This ongoing search is a core element of their personality. It is linked to far deeper roots. It turns out to be a tendency which derives from a not immediately discernible sense memory of deprivation or loss or vulnerability and a subsequent longing for substitution, closely allied with moodiness and depressive leanings." And you know it's an authoritative book, because there are two colons in its title.

To put Muensterberger's thesis in straightforward terms, what we couldn't get as kids, we crave now. And we'll pursue those cravings at the expense of many things that may be even more important. Like, well, relating to other human beings.

Crowds at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance -- Steve W. Grayson -- Getty Images

To me, Muensterberger is right in that the desire to collect things may be something embedded in all humans. But he misses how collecting facilitates human interaction and bonding. This October, while antique-car lovers in the east are headed for the annual swap meet in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the 33rd Annual Hot Wheels Collectors Convention will commence at the elegant Los Angeles Airport Marriott in, no surprise, Los Angeles, California. The Hot Wheels Collectors Conventions are a riot of toy cars, but they're also one of the few places where Hot Wheels nerds can fully express their obsession among like-minded fanatics.

Whole floors of the Airport Marriott will be given over to the rapacious hordes of toy-car fiends. Signs will point showgoers to particular rooms open for collectors to inspect and buy from. The beds will be covered in blue paper blister-packed cars three or four decks deep, each car noted for its unique status in Hot Wheels history. The more obscure the history, the better.

But the best thing about the convention is the camaraderie. Strangers who usually keep their Hot Wheels obsession tight let it flow in the dark hallways of the Marriott. There's laughter after stupid jokes only people who knew the difference between a Custom Fleetside and a Sky Show Fleetside will ever get. Email addresses are swapped, promises to meet again next year are made, and surely a few little Hot Wheelers are conceived. So in those ways, it's nearly an identical experience to what happens on the lawn at Pebble Beach every year.

We're sharing our attitudes about a thing we can barely articulate.

Werner Muensterberger is not my go-to guy for explaining human motivations. But Tom Wolfe, the great chronicler of 20th-century American culture, is. What obsessed Wolfe was how Americans sought out status among themselves by knowing and acknowledging rules that they may not even be aware they're following. "Things have been going on in the development of the kids' formal attitude toward cars since 1945," he wrote in his great 1963 essay The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, "things of great sophistication that adults have not been even remotely aware of, mainly because the kids are so inarticulate about it, especially the ones most hipped on the subject."

And that's what happens in Monterey and on Woodward Avenue. We're sharing our attitudes about a thing we can barely articulate. And trying to impress others who share the same secret language. There's some cross-pollination between Monterey and Woodward, but basically, they're two dialects of one language. And that language is cars.

I missed both Monterey and Woodward this year. I will not miss the Hot Wheels Collectors Convention in October.

SOURCE: CAR AND DRIVER